Integrating non-doing with global systemic change
I’m torn. There seem to be two elements of me that are constantly fighting with each other.
The first is my belief that humanity is at a crossroads with respect to global systemic change, particularly around global warming and the associated need to restructure our civilisation. If we don’t adjust our course dramatically and quickly then we will find ourselves in a world very much unlike the one that has allowed human civilisations to rise and flourish.
The energy I channel here is Carl Sagan’s, particularly his child-like wonder as he looked up at the stars and saw humanity’s future exploring them.
“The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos Episode 7
The second is my belief that the best outcomes flow from a state of ‘non-doing’, which is something I’ve picked up from Alexander Technique and my Zen practice.
Forcefully trying to achieve something with an excess of effort, particularly in the context of our minds and bodies, just interferes with the natural functioning of our system. Trying to catch a ball is harder and less effective than just letting it happen (you’ll just have to take my word for it if that doesn’t make sense).
The energy I channel here is more like the Buddha’s: no clinging, no grasping, no attachment. The heart of being is emptiness – a full, vibrant and always transforming emptiness – and expecting it to be otherwise only creates suffering:
“Embrace nothing:
If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.
If you meet your father, kill your father.
Only live your life as it is,
Not bound to anything.”
― Gautama Siddharta (Buddha)
These perspectives are both very alive in me, yet it feels like they also set up a contradiction. Reversing climate change, exploring the stars and evolving down a path of enlightened high technology feels like ‘doing’. Meanwhile, letting go of any craving for things to be any particular way feels like ‘non-doing’.
Which of these feelings is correct? Well, every fibre of my being is telling me that non-doing is correct. It is nature – that thing the Daoists call Ziran (自然) – “so of itself”.
On the other hand, it’s clear that I – and I think most of us – see ideas like reversing climate change and exploring the stars as a kind of doing, as things that require trying and effort. There’s an implicit belief at play here that human nature is, at its core, bad and must be fought against for fear of regressing to some debauched state that is what we really are. “If we stop trying then entropy will knock us back to where we belong.”
It boils down to the paradox at the heart of all endeavours in self-improvement, which is captured perfectly by Alan Watts:
“Human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible. You know—as the proverb says—you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. But recently, I’ve heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening where people say, “We’ve got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps!” And you can’t! And you can struggle, and tug, and pull until you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you’ve exhausted yourself.”
[…]
“But the thing is that you can’t do it for one very simple reason—which, I think, most of you are by now familiar with—is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved.” – Alan Watts, Veil of Thoughts – Pt. 2
This is where Alan would go off and talk about the self being an illusion, that the part of us that wants to improve (the self) can’t do anything to improve because it doesn’t exist. I won’t go there (much). Instead, I’ll ask a question that this line of thought implies: how, then, do we make things better?
Alan talks about this paradox at the societal scale in his excellent Conversation With Myself (well worth watching in full), where he describes a meeting of famous people exploring what to do about environmental degradation. The conclusion they reached was that the best approach would be to leave the world alone and return the direction of nature to nature, since it knows a lot more about how it works than we do.
To leave the world alone suggests, to me, a kind of civilisational non-doing. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique, which explores the cessation of doing at its core, I know the value of non-doing and can now begin to recognise my mistake in thinking of exploring the stars as a kind of ‘doing’.
The felt sense of non-doing – what the Daoists call wu-wei – is not the same as doing nothing. Doing and doing nothing are two sides of the same coin, while non-doing – the absence of doing or doing nothing – is something else entirely.
When you peel back all the layers of effort that you do habitually, what you find is just you, authentically and naturally you. It’s your own, personal Ziran (nature that is “so of itself”). This is what remains when the illusion of the self goes away. It’s not some void of nothingness – quite the opposite. It’s what it’s like to be fully alive, switched on and one with your environment. It’s the world turned up to 11.
I get excited here, because I know that our non-doing selves are so much more powerful, creative and competent than our habitual, doing selves. Rather than using the thinking part of my brain to move my body to catch a ball, I can just watch as my body does it on its own, much better than ‘I’ could have done. Rather than trying to fall asleep, which only keeps me awake, I can decide to stop doing the things that are keeping me awake and just watch as I fall asleep.
This is what it means to return the direction of nature to nature, but it requires some acts of faith that, in my experience working on myself and with others, can be difficult.
First, it’s difficult because it requires letting go of control and trusting that something else knows what it’s doing. When I catch that ball effortlessly or fall asleep, I don’t know how I did that. There’s something else doing it and it isn’t ‘me’.
Second, it’s difficult because it requires believing that letting go of control and trusting this other system is a good thing. In fact, this point is somewhat moot for the same reason that it’s impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Transformation is the nature of all things and it happens by allowing it, not by forcing or fighting it, whether you believe it or not. The challenge for us here is about accepting that. Both fighting and forcing interfere with the process and cause us suffering.
Let’s bring this back to such grand things as reversing climate change and one day exploring the stars. The process by which we’ll get to wherever we’re going can be reached without forcing it, if you believe that we are part of nature and that nature is always transforming and evolving. In fact, to try to force it in any particular direction just interferes with the transformation that is always going on.
I believe that reversing climate change and exploring the stars are part of our transformational journey – a natural part of where we’re going as a species. We don’t need to force it, we just need to not interfere with it. Thus, what I am talking about is neither trying to create a new space age (‘doing’), nor de-industrialising completely (‘doing nothing’). I wrote about these opposing views in my article on carbon removal and in fact now believe them to be two sides of the same doing coin.
One of the principles of non-doing is to be able to stop doing. We know there are plenty of things we shouldn’t be doing that we could stop if we so wanted. We’re on the path to this with decarbonisation, but at the moment I fear that we are trying half-heartedly to assert a new system while still strongly asserting the old one, like investing in renewables while subsidising fossil fuels. This is self-interference.
We have now reached the edge of my awareness, though. I’m at a stage where I know there is something important here, but I don’t yet know what it is. It will unfold, I just need to not force it.**